DOJ Releases Final Report On Ferguson Unrest Detailing More Than 100 Lessons

The report, conducted by the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services office, focused on the 17-day time frame between Brown’s death and his funeral. The assessment does not provide a lot of new information, but it does provide greater insight into how policing tactics and strategy unfolded during that time when the atmosphere between law enforcement and demonstrators was especially tense.

There were a total of 113 lessons and a half-dozen themes that “permeated all aspects of the police response,” according to the report. Some of those included inconsistent leadership, lack of understanding of community concerns with law enforcement and use of “ineffective and inappropriate” tactics that escalated instead of diminishing tensions.

Thursday on NewsOne Now, Roland Martin and the Straight Talk Panel discussed the findings of this revealing report. NewsOne Now panelist Danielle Belton told Martin, “There has to be policy that comes out of this, because otherwise we’ll repeat this all over again in another suburban town in the United States.” She added the police in Ferguson “threw as many militarized police as they could at the problem as possible. They saw a bunch of people protesting and saw a lot of people upset. They just lost their minds for two weeks last summer and we can’t see a repeat of that.”

“We’ve already seen a repeat of it,” said Avis Jones-DeWeever. She added that one year after Mike Brown was shot in Ferguson, police are still “engaging in some of the same tactics. They have not really produced any change in Ferguson, much less anywhere else around the country.”

“So what is the difference?” she continued. “To have people just be able to resign and get their retirements and go on their merry way or get a job someplace else does not solve the problem. The root is still there and the horrendous outcomes are still there.”

Watch Roland Martin; Maya Rockeymoore, President and CEO of Global Policy Solutions; Danielle Belton, Associate Editor of TheRoot.com; and Avis Jones-DeWeever from the Exceptional Leadership Institute for Women, discuss the findings of the final Department of Justice report on the unrest in Ferguson in the video clip above.